http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2013/01/polio-virus-spreads-from-pakista.html?ref=hpHealth officials in Egypt and the world are scrambling to prevent an outbreak of polio after poliovirus from Pakistan was discovered in sewage samples collected at two sites in Cairo in December.
Genetic analysis just completed has linked the Egyptian viruses to one that was last seen in Pakistan in September 2012. How it got to Cairo remains unclear, but the genetic evidence suggests that the virus made the long journey sometime in the past 3 months. Egypt has been polio-free since 2004.
So far, no polio cases have been found in Cairo, and there is no evidence that the virus has established itself and begun to circulate widely. But it's a real risk, says Bruce Aylward, who runs the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) from the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland.
"The last thing anyone wants is for Eqypt to be reinfected," Aylward says. That's why the country and the international agencies that advise it are treating the positive samples as a fullblown outbreak, "We are being very, very aggressive," Aylward says.
The importation of the virus into Egypt is another setback for the global program, which has finally been making significant progress in the past 2 years, with polio cornered in just three endemic countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. (India has now gone 2 years without a single case of polio.) Of the three, Pakistan was doing especially well in knocking out the virus, but the program there has recently been disrupted by the targeted assassination of nine polio workers in December and early January. Those killings, widely condemned, have stoked fears the virus will regain strength in Pakistan and then reinfect polio-free countries. "This is proof positive of long-distance importation from Pakistan, and there may be more," Aylward says.
This is only the second time poliovirus from Pakistan has infected any country other than neighboring Afghanistan; the first was China, where a virus from Pakistan sparked an outbreak in 2011. This new importation puts even more pressure on Pakistan to wipe out the virus within its borders.
Topic: Polio from Pakistan found in Egypt